Carole Middleton, the mother of the Duchess of Cambridge, is said to be keen
to join the All England club, but some members are not happy.

As Novak Djokovic attempts to overthrow the reigning Wimbledon champion, Rafael Nadal, the scene is being set for a battle royal elsewhere at the All England club.

Mandrake hears that Carole Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge’s mother, is keen to join the home of lawn tennis, but this has alarmed some of the club’s members.

“Carole has not yet been proposed, but the word is that she would very much like this to happen,” one member tells me. “She was introduced to a number of influential people in the club. Carole’s known to be an adequate club player, but no more than that, and there would be a few noses out of joint if she was fast-tracked.”

Carole watched Andy Murray beat Feliciano López in the quarter finals last week, with her husband, Michael, and daughter Pippa.

They were invited as guests of Tony and Jane Henman, who are family friends. Tim Henman’s parents, who are members of the club, took tea with the Middletons in the Members’ Enclosure before the match. The Henmans play regular doubles games with the Middletons in Berkshire.

Flora Vestey surprised her friends by announcing that she was engaged scarcely a year after separating from her first husband, Laurence Kilby.

Now, the 32-year-old daughter of the beef baron Lord Vestey has some more happy news: she is expecting her first child.

Flora, whose father is the Queen’s Master of the Horse, married James Hall, a Nottinghamshire property developer, last week. The ceremony was not, however, held at Stowell Park, her family’s 6,000-acre estate in Gloucestershire, but at Chelsea register office in London.

Hall, who is said to have an intriguing past, is understood to have been previously married to an American with a colourful background.

When Mandrake announced Flora’s engagement to Kilby, an entrepreneur, in 2007, her stepmother seemed underwhelmed. “I believe her fiancé is in the motor trade,’’ Lady Vestey told me.